Quick Tips! COVID-19 and Commencement

No doubt, college is challenging. It requires a great deal of commitment and resilience to get through a program and become a graduate. So, when students no longer have the opportunity to celebrate their success at commencement, they become heartbroken. In this Quick Tips! video, Cheryl Broom offers advice on how to handle the “canceling commencement” conversation so graduates (and supporters) don’t feel robbed of their time to shine.

Hi, I’m Cheryl Broom, president of Interact Communications,
and we are now a couple weeks into the COVID-19 crisis. Most community colleges
have moved their courses to an online format and others are in the process of
doing so right now. We’ve also seen a lot of community colleges move to either
cancel or postpone their commencement ceremonies, and I would venture to guess
this is a trend that we’re going to continue to see in the upcoming weeks.

Commencement is such an important milestone. I mean, look.
Even behind me in my home office, I have my degrees hung. I can remember my commencement
ceremonies. My grandpa was a janitor who went on to form a really successful
janitorial company in Los Angeles, and he never graduated from college. He came
to my graduation ceremonies and I’ll never forget getting my diploma up on
stage and looking out in the audience and seeing my grandpa standing up and he
did a clog. Clogging is a type of folk dance and my grandpa was clogging in the
stands and had his hat and was whooping it around and was just so proud and so
excited and just a memory that has lasted with me my entire life. And I think
it’s safe to say all of us that graduated from high school or from our bachelor
or our master’s or our doctoral programs have had that be one of the most
proudest moments of our lives. And I think our students right now are feeling
depressed and a little robbed that they’re not going to be able to have that
same level of excitement.

So as I’m thinking about messaging and how to break the
news to your students and what you can say, for those of you who haven’t made
the decision yet on whether or not to cancel commencement, I think it’s
important that you have some sort of holding statement that you let your
students know that you’re looking into whether or not you’re going to postpone
the commencement ceremony and that you’re looking at other ways to celebrate
this monumental accomplishment. Don’t leave them guessing whether or not this
decision is going to be made. Let them know you’re discussing it internally.

Also, don’t just cancel commencement. The language you use
is really important. I would say that if you do decide to postpone it, that you
use the word postpone and that you let them know explicitly that you are
looking at other ways to celebrate their successes, including maybe holding the
commencement ceremony in the fall or celebrating virtually. You don’t have to
have all the answers right now, but I think it’s important that you recognize
that commencement is a really, really, really important part of celebrating
their accomplishments and that you as an institution want to be there for them
and provide them the opportunity to celebrate all of their hard work over the
past couple of years.

So be kind, be compassionate, communicate frequently. I
would suggest that you add commencement to your FAQs, even if you’re still just
examining it, on your COVID-19 response website. If you have an FAQ section,
have one of them be “Is my community college going to hold a commencement
ceremony?” And if you don’t know yet, then put in there that you’re currently
examining it and that you’ll be sending out updates as they become available.

We’ve seen some really creative things across the world—students
who have done amazing things to still celebrate digitally, including virtual
commencements, posting pictures of their mortar boards, all decorated on
Instagram. Maybe if you are postponing it, still on the original commencement
day, you send out a video congratulating students on their success and asking
them to share. Create a hashtag so that students can share what they’re doing
on their graduation day even if it is postponed. You know, Get together with
your campus, find some way to create community in this crisis. I think
community is still so important, and celebrating success is still such a key
part of what we need to do as educators.

So, I hope I gave you some ideas, some things to
contemplate, some things to think about. If you want to give me a call and just
chat about some ideas you have or you want to share ideas with colleges across
the nation, we do have a message board that we created at Interact called
discourse for COVID-19 and you can get to it by typing on
discourse.interactcom.com. Post some commencement ideas. I know that the NCMPR
message board or their listserv has had a lot of ideas floating around there as
well. It’s important right now to stay connected and to make sure your students
know that you’re thinking about them, and that even though they might not get
the commencement ceremony this spring, like they always dreamed of, they will
get one and you will help them celebrate. That’s an important message for them
to know right now.

Well, that’s all I have to offer today and I hope you took
something away. And like always, thank you so much for all the hard work that
you do for community college students across the nation. I’ll talk to you next
time. Bye.

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